The Artist, dreaming

as a dragonfly; or lightning bug waking
as a child in a dark room, screams
in a language unrecognizable

as the light flies into the night,
flies long after midnight and widens,
wide awake before the sun
rises, the child

pasted dreams onto his wall; clipped photos
of places yet unseen, windmills or stone statues
and the other wonders, chimerical;

illuminating, to a child lapping
soft ice cream served by a sad man
covered in a hardened cherry-like shell

after lessons of palindromes and circle time
on the brightly colored alphabet rug, /the muse/

an abiding child, standing under the streetlight,
posed as a giclee on canvas, but thicker;
not for stained-glass but perfect in charcoal
or graphite, the lamb of his father as a shadow
scratched onto dry white parchment, lonely

infant man, the artist
in his element /the moment he dies/

remembering pottery, thick chalky figures standing,
sticking to newspaper, soaking up smudged ink
from pages, blackened /mostly/ from the press
to the hands of the paperboy who left it
on the earthen floor early before his lessons
/in heartache/ of the learning urges lost

in graffiti, graphic, telling thick-skinned foreigners
and kind strangers to leave the cities
where the familiar has triumphed, has earned
its place on the buildings and their stony walls

but none so balanced and composed /vibrant/
as the shadows of the white trees, black
shadows against the /frozen/ orange sky,

perfected by three neon lights, in a row,
vertical, red to yellow as the sun darkens
the scene, and green as the picture slips away,
not captured but by one, the artist
feeling lucky, smiling as he lies.

the words chosen; praising the child
using the inaudible language of the earth

sensing the man who was to fall to the ground
but never to earth, who leaves the memory of a tessera,
brightly colored as a sentient peacock, still sliding
gracefully over the rippled water of the pond
outside the bedroom of a child

who'd have kept the worn old teddy,
brown, weary, and dull, who saved him once,

but the artist moves, perpetually;

he's here on the alphabet rug, smiling
as he cries
for those who remain
/left of the light/

he's writing a song, smiling
as he dies